


Something to Count

by Leontocephalina



Series: The Golden Section [1]
Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Alcoholism, Animalistic, Body Horror, Dehumanization, Devil Trigger - Freeform, Dissociation, Dubious Consent, Dysphoria, Eye Trauma, Hermaphrodites - Freeform, Implied Cannibalism, Implied Torture, Incest, Intrusive Thoughts, Major Depression, Nelo Angelo - Freeform, Nevan - Freeform, Novel Canon Compliant, Other, PTSD, Seizure, Self-Harm, Size Difference, Unreliable Narrator, Vomiting, implied prostitution, implied rape
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:42:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25367779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leontocephalina/pseuds/Leontocephalina
Summary: When Dante's denial runs dry, there's bones at the bottom. (1D and Nelo Angelo try to adjust after Mundus's defeat.)
Relationships: Dante/Nelo Angelo, Dante/Vergil
Series: The Golden Section [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1837024
Comments: 8
Kudos: 28





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Other better, worser summary:
> 
> Dante: I'll worry about that when it happens.  
> Trish: It's happening.  
> Dante: damn ma is it that serious
> 
>  **This fic contains explicit dubcon and incest; it's not just subtext**, nor is it easily dismissed like, "Haha, so this thing with Trish--who's identical to Dante's mom but not actually her so it's just kinky, right? ;)--happened off-screen, and Nero thinks of Kyrie 'like' a sister." Nope! No simile-safety-nets, here!
> 
>  **I also don't tag for content that would spoil the story, unless it's traumatic.** Nothing is particularly graphic except the characters' sex-- and their sex fantasies, which explore intersex anatomy in a completely irrational way indicative of the character's mental state. As a CMOA, please don't read this if you might be triggered by the tagged content. I'm not responsible for you, but I don't like to cause the unfun kind of pain, haha.
> 
> If you comment, thank you very much! It means a lot. (And if you spy my lyrical breadcrumbs, kudos to you!)
> 
>  **ETA:** I didn't want someone to miss a trigger among all my **joke tags** , so they've been scooted down here: 
> 
> Cue "It's Always Sunny" Theme, Brave Little Toaster Physics, Demon Twins Are Just...Like That..., Choose Your Own Adventure!, Het Bait, i'm at the combination hotdog hut and taco bell, Anatomy of Hell Imagery, Misleadingly Cheerful Tags, AU of an AU, That's Not Very Punny, I've Been Trapped Inside This Flashback for a Thousand Years, Silent Hill Brand Psychosis, DOORSTUCK I BEG YOU, Shakespeare Invented Words and So Can I

Dante watches the Knight sidelong over his still-scorched desk. He thinks he does "terminally disaffected" well; after all, he has-- _had_ \--so little to lose that really matters. In this business--and that _other_ business he doesn't really talk about--disillusionment is something of a virtue. You couldn't sit across from a guy, never mind devil, and talk business if you came off too--

The chitinous crunch of living armor alerts him to movement and he's half a beat to triggering, Ebony out with Ivory on the upsweep, before he realizes it's only mirroring his own sprawl. The Knight does this almost daintily--because of its wounds--with the kind of deliberation a child assembles their toy castle, until its boots clang over the couch's armrest and its gauntlets cross beneath its enormous white neck. It glances at him, sidelong, and shutters its too-many translucent eyelids. One blink has audible-- texture. _Viscosity_.

The word _scum_ lands on his nose like a fat fly, and Dante sees in the Knight's faceted eyes the depthless animality of Mallet's other parasites. He recalls with a dart of urgency the countdown, the slog through septic grime and its ecstatic swarms, then Mundus--metastasizing, the final calamity--in a bloody blast of broiling stone. _All those hands, useless in the end._ Talk about made in His image.

The memory of Mallet shifts, scraping so deliciously against Dante's more distant, more nuclear, past that he nearly shivers: two wills, wrought in silver, gold, and steel. In suspension. _Epiphany._ The cloven heart, dismayed by signs of another occupant within its chambers. ( _I didn't say you could come in._ ) Then, his purely technical triumph: the final cut, like an old B-movie. ( _Get out!_ )

"So, where's your sword?" Dante says, smearing it all into bravado. "Never figured you for a piece like that."

With its better arm, the Knight scratches its chest plate. It's a bereft, almost shy gesture, and so alien to him it seems practically bestial. There's no precedent; no clear countermeasure. Still, he doesn't frown.

 _Agni-Rudra_. Dante plunges into the bubbling mercury of his soul for the-- the other brothers. _Where is it? Where's my-- where's its sword?_

_Master!_ This song and dance, again. But no, not quite; they're even more-- enthusiastic, this time. _You have recovered your_ \--

And he never really bothered to translate this next word, but it seemed almost disproportionately versatile to the infernal language. _Much too fine an overture._ Most devils, ironically, were too dull to appreciate the details. Himself included, these days. He just didn't like the way-- he just didn't like anything too complicated.

"You've got ten seconds, starting--"

_!!!_

"--oops, actually--haha--ending now."

_Wait, Master! His sword is--!_

"Sweet dreams, you two." Dante pops the lid back on, handily. _Like a pickle jar._ He's mean to them because they're always so, _so_ eager, and so-- synchronic. But they never chafe, they just-- even now they radiate love and loyalty and pride, like new parents.

"Despite me, to spite me," he grumbles, and the Knight blinks its dolorous eyes at him again. He thinks of a soused starlet--not of its wasting bulk, startled into a clamor by the toaster just last week--and is disaffected by the comparison. All its oily afterimages.

( _Glittersheen beneath buffet lamps: everyone trying to make names out of their bodies; signatures in sinew and contortionist cursive, like it was nothing to break something if only it looked good. No blush, no bruise, no blisters; just rougey assertions. No one broke character unless you gave them a reason. It was like they couldn't speak, sometimes-- charmed against themselves, by themselves._ )

"You're up," Dante makes the command bland and assured-- _disaffected_ \--because he wants the grumpy gorgon's feathers truly fussed. "Beowulf."

It snorts gustily, which has the desired, undesirable effect of toppling his little rising house of thought-cards. **_What_** _, Sparda? I won't trouble myself for another deserter. And with the gall to bend its Fell Name to man's tongue! "Yaw-maw-toe." Hmph! What do you think of **that** , Three-Dog-Might?_

 _You think you are so funny,_ Cerberus snarls. _But only the brothers like Three Dog Night_.

 _A disgrace!_ Beowulf rails. Dante is not sure whom it means, but with Beowulf it never seems to matter-- _You are so **weak** , Sparda. **He** is so weak! Put me on and we will beat him back into shape, together. **Master** him!_

 _No!_ Agni-Rudra interjects, ardent. _You cannot do that! What about the human mouth-custom?_

"Huh?" Dante says, before he thinks better of it.

_The sucking thing!_

The gorgon is very nearly aghast. _Kissing?_

_Yes!_

( _Shock-burn, numb-scald, loose-tight; **hateful** , indecisive skin--_)

 _Sometimes,_ _Master forgets to dispel Netflix and it casts the Mouth Comedies_. The brothers sigh, dreamily. _We like it when the humans pretend to eat each other. It is precious._

" _Mute_ ," Dante says, viciously dunking them back underwater. "We're talking swords, here, not talking-swords."

 _Indeed,_ Beowulf allows, with only the kingliest dignity and scorn. _Your young eyes could not perceive its half-state. But most cannot. That blade is bowed with Mundus's **embellishments**. As cancerous as its master! That is why I say we take them **now** , while there is still the chance your blood might burn out their corruption._

Dante pretends to consider it, considering the Knight, but it is Nevan who bullies ahead-- her and her sirenic shadow, gleeful and wheeling and waiting on no one; because they were together. _What would that be like?_

The Knight tilts its head, and Dante has the unhappy thought that it is learning even his minutest expressions, like dogs were bred to do.

Nevan's violet insights flicker at his fingertips, but he doesn't take the bait. She is just too tender with-- with whatever it is that she loves and, unlike Agni and Rudra, she has both the grudge and the inborn appetite for cruelty; to extract from him infinite penances.

At first, Dante had envied the supple strength of their union. Then, he was appalled by it-- by how easily they bit and kissed and touched and tore. Once, she invited him to dance, but declined to tell him her partner's name-- or even if it was only a very convincing doppel. It giggled, though--like her bats--and flaunted fangs newly wetted at its sister's throat. _Naked trust. A gift so readily given and received, it made violence into grace._

That had been worse than if he'd seen them fucking.

But he has another memory--

( _A dream?_ )

\--of an opera house, shabby and intimate as an attic room. Burgundy, musty seats. And so _squeaky._ Studded with a hundred steel buttons that may have once been bright, like eyes in the night, but now only glinted sullenly with their corrosion. Probably it had been a grand house, but he never liked sitting for music. Something about the unseen orchestra's tuning though, when it started--the stammer of devotion-dented keys and the waver of strings in the moted dark--seemed almost disconcertingly animal and-- afraid--?

( _Of him?_ )

\--so he had kept his seat. Not made any sudden movements. Out of those swirling, classical eddies sprung the whine of a harmonica-- incongruous, irreverent. The clucking of an acoustic guitar followed, then someone giggled--

_Hello?_

\--and a voice-- no, two voices; so perfectly doubled he mistook the second for vibrato, ascended in the overture to some infernal hymn. The soprano poured lilting, liquid-gold light. Her alto proffered the cup, echoing her alms. Their conspiration teased a dearer memory from his heart: his parents in the music room improvising a duet, now and again coaxing their small children to participate. They'd sound off in scattered rounds, as befit their muses' caprices: his father's soft, susurrous tenor; his mother's alto, plummy but vivacious; h--

(-- _is favorites were those Greek dance songs_ , the ones that sent them all spinning like leaves across the floor. _Sunny, unpretentious._ But the serenades were nice, too, because they lingered long enough for him to step and sway atop his parents' shoes. He would hug his mother's knees until she stopped, laughing, to pet his head. Her apron always smelled so good, like fresh bread and berries--

( _\--but it was even more fun when Dad did it. Heh, both of us hanging onto his legs like little monkeys--_ )

His mother had been a consummate fiddler and his father a truly grand pianist. But then, looking back on it, half the instruments in their possession had been quite literally possessed themselves, so it was impossible to give them their due credit.

At the height of the orchestra's performance, his dream informed him--as dreams sometimes did--that there was no one in the audience but him and, what was more, he was not even the intended recipient-- not really. Because this was music for musicians; for those who could join because they knew where, and how, and when; for those who knew their hosts by name. Nevertheless: time pulled and parted itself, and out of it wound the blue tongue of a violin so singularly sweet it seemed to address him-- _him_ ; directly, by name--before it seized him by the throat.

( _When I heard Mom play-- when I heard you practicing in the pines, up so high because I was afraid to go up--_ )

Not daring to swallow, he stood--no, was already standing--with the intent, he assumed, to applaud. A swell of vertigo, dream-reasoned, staggered him as surely as a fall, and he caught himself on the backing of the adjacent seat.

The shadow giggled again, but it was a cheerless expression without even its customary malice. He thought it might even be apologetic, because in that moment Nevan suddenly vanished or receded into the upholstery; or whatever it was she did, whenever she went, wherever she went. Deprived of its star artists, the space in the house seemed to bristle and seethe with itself.

He had not heard the end of the performance; knew he'd frightened it away, but also that he had been compelled to do so by his own appreciation. He was reminded of a neighbor who said he killed his deer because he loved them; and then of his father, a gentleman, who had never kept trophy heads. _When I wish to see the deer, I will go to the woods where they, too, can see me._

Perhaps, it was not so much guilt or sorrow which broke men--nothing so neat--but merely the limits of their resonance, like a glass rung too often to make too many frivolous announcements. Devils were made of much sterner stuff, but he knew better than anyone that they, too, could break.

Alone in the opera house, Dante cleared his throat and his soul fluttered back down to him from the rafters. He rubbed his palms together, as if to generate some demonstrably willful action; a smudge upon the ordained hush that would declare his own perspective amid its hostile singularity.

One by one, like rotten eggs hatching, the seats' rusty buttons peeled themselves open. And then they blinked, a wave of red and _clock-spits-clicks_ , and all saw him intruding; standing there fidgeting with his hands like a wayward child. _Nothing quite so rude and unnatural as a watching silence._

The whispery husk of his gloves is almost unbearable. _Fricative. Itchy._

In the pit of himself where he discards things, one of them burns, withers up his neck, and beats itself hatefully against his head. He smells-- charred wood, blood-quenched and moldy with resentment; hears it clatter upright before he turns, knowing full well he'll find another one of Mundus's damn puppets onstage--

(Nevan's shadow giggles.)

\--It's blue.

( _Naturally_ , Nevan says.)

Its face is very handsomely carved.

( _Poor boy._ )

( _No!_ her shadow corrects her, delighted. _He says "foolish little brother," like he's **tired** of being in love._)

( _My clever darling! Between the two of us, love does not tire._ )

( _But he's only wooden, after all. It burns._ )

It's easy to lose time in dreams. They only make sense in the nebulae of their moments--elementally, as they're expanding--or in the aftermath. Maybe there are impressions, like pillowed-cheek creases, or bloody breath and gummy eyelids, or sweat-stiff sheets and spilled bottles, or the wanton destruction of property. He learned to hide his nicer things at night and count his heartbeats any other time it got dark.

He counts them now.

 _One. Two_ \--

( _\--dandelion seeds, in a black-buzzing field--_ )

\-- _three_ \--

( _\--static inference--no, interference--_

 _\--breathe too hard then the beats scatter, like a wish you didn't want to make--_ )

\-- ** _three_**. ... _No._

( _Lost count. Again, then--_ )

 _One. And, two. And, **three**_ \--

(--and--

"--and, one-two-three!" Eva spins and twirls her small son, and when he squeals perhaps she notices the elder, sitting sullenly not-reading in the corner--)

Pain, remembered, is useless. It is worse than useless; it bewitches and befuddles. He has little respect for those wallowing waddlers--the charlatan "therapists," the wolf-criers and quicksand-squatters--but some sympathy, perhaps, because pain can root you--

(-- _if you grab it by the horns, and make it real._ )

The office reasserts itself first, in a purplish-yellow, pulsating fizz. He's standing, numb-bodied but academically aware of its placement, and--

He smells blood. Then he hears it dripping. _Yes._ Because he's still counting the beats. _Same thing._ Good, but not-good: he's alive. But if he's bleeding he's not healing, and if he's not healing that's not-good.

 _What happened_ , he doesn't say.

 _Oh, Master..._ Agni-Rudra, of course.

Cerberus huffs, but there's no fire in it. _Your "devil" snapped._ One of its heads licks consolingly at the other's frothy mouth. _Beowulf challenged it._

 ** _Don't slander me, dog!_** the gorgon spits and the office tilts, purpling somehow even worse, but Dante doesn't feel it. He just sees it, happening with him--

" _Challenged." **Challenged**!_ Beowulf hacks and Dante notes, objectively, that he-- that his allies are hurt. _I will challenge no lowly Fell-brat because I am not lowly. How dare you!_

 _Master,_ Agni-Rudra interrupts. _Your devil-- savaged itself. We tried-- Beowulf wrestled it and--_

 _You half-headed, miserable little cripple!_ The gorgon, again. _If you cannot even bear your own despair, don't try and feed it to the siren!_

Someone giggles, and his vision is restored. Oh, color TV. _Thanks, sister._ Surround sound, next; and, yes-- we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming--

An animal wails.

Dante looks down and-- gauntlets. He blinks. Huh. _Alright, then._ He moves his armored hands. _No response._ He pulls. _Won't budge._ Tugs. _Yanks, then?!_ Looks up, almost furious with panic, and-- _oh_.

The Knight.

It makes that animal-sound, again.

"Let go," Dante says, brittly; with the scalding chill of disgust. "I'm not a fan of caricatures."

The Knight shakes its head, bulling. It strokes Dante's hands between its own massive paws, but it wasn't made for precision or dexterity; much less this. It was brutalized; for brutality. He remembers the-- the elegance of efficiency. How it-- had hoarsened his criticisms, once, long before he saw them validated by the cruelest methods.

Dante's sword hand trembles, but he permits the Knight to rotate his wrists and expose for his inspection-- lacerations, bruises; he's broken one fist and it's skewed in its skin, like a smashed spider in a peach-colored candy wrapper.

"Oh," he says, to himself. "That makes sense, yeah. There's just glass." The shards shimmer beautifully with his blood, like clotted rubies. "What else did I break?"

The Knight's expression, when it grapples with its own clumsy physicality, is so-- Dante laughs out loud, and some animal-thing spasms inside, when it tries to extract the biggest shard from his left hand; mincilly tweezing its thumb and finger like the finest surgeon this side of Crab County.

It glares, sullen. He stops laughing.

The Knight kneels, so carefully, but it still clangs onto the gap in its greaves. Dante can't think, or maybe all his thoughts just fall in with the Knight--welded-down, fused--when it brings his hand to its lips and opens its mouth. Its teeth and tongue touch glass, and skin and flesh. _The cruder the instrument, the more intimate the surgery._

Dante jumps at the first clear "ting" of success, when the Knight spits a small shard onto the floor. _Something to count, at least._ He submits, he thinks, to its mothering because he is too humiliated to entertain more; so floored he's got no platform.

Twenty "tings" later, the Knight maneuvers his hand to focus on the last shard-- a real pizza'd-up slice of the moon. Dante watches it shuffle from knee to knee and, as if to divert stimuli to its more intuitional senses, shut its eyes and lean in with a red heat. It laps with stubborn reverence at the gash in his palm; nibbles like a cleaning cat once the offending edge peaks and, though it cuts its own tongue, it receives this final aberration unto itself.

And then it does not stop.

(There is always, somewhere, a stone fountain that bleeds with the right appeals; always an ocean and an avenging tide; always a king-fir, black as despair, resisting the Flood and laden with the un-Arked and other unfavored; always his mute devil among them, the whole company braying for its banishment from those coveted crown-branches; even half-drowned hares snapping at its slipping hooves; seeking greater heights from which to behold the dream's blue-tongued violin. It does not cry, even when the red sea rises; even when none remain who could taunt or even share its tears.)

Blood batters Dante's temples: it scalds, curses, spits; surely would evaporate before it permitted Mundus's painted fool to meet it; before it let itself be tasted sweet on some slave's tongue, or recommended to the slaver as too rare not to own; for its own good.

He breathes, hard; shudders harder when the Knight releases his hand before he can argue his-- discomfort. He drops it like a contaminant, or feels like he wants to; if it wasn't attached to his arm and tingling raw-cool, kissed and knitting itself ever closer, he'd throw it out the window.

The Knight grinds back onto its thighs and breathes, too, peaceful. Dante snorts and its beetly gaze skitters onto him.

"You look like a clown," he says, indicating his own, unbloodied, nose with a finger.

It goes cross-eyed.

"Perfect," Dante grins.

The Knight looks sullen again, so he laughs harder. When it licks its lips and-- and its nose, tongue as muscular as a tentacle, talons still grating noisily at its thorax, Dante about-faces before his devil can crane in too much. "...Got something that might help with that. The itching."

His boots pulverize more broken glass--the cheap stuff; he only keeps the cheapest stuff out--as he surveys his damages. In the grips, he goes after pretty predictable targets: whiskey, of course; the juke box that has been juked more times than he can count but, like its owner, is hexed beyond any lasting harm; his trophy heads, jeering and bearing baleful witness. Skulls are just as easy to crack as bottles, so that's how he thinks of them. _Junk._

( _When I wish to see the deer_ \--)

"--You're not really made of metal, right?" Dante asks, without really asking the Knight. He rounds the re-traumatized desk and is nastily gratified to feel the old raven-roost's aura shrink from his own. _Small wonder._ His devil is pacing and bristle-backed, even if he is pleased to see his mother's portrait in place. He rattles the desk drawers until they cough up the prize, then holds it aloft like a young Perseus, utterly disaffected by history; as its inheritor. He slips it over his head. "Look familiar?"

There's a titanic crash from the other side of the room, as the Knight tries to stand and collapses forward, face-first, like it's been shot in the back.

Dante stares, riveted. Its limp, white hair. Its jerked-jagged neck.

 _A seeming eternity._ Then it stirs, rocking like a tortoise, and positions itself to push back up. One arm crumples to take it down again.

Dante tricks over. Wedges his shoulder, his arms, his strength. "Easy." A paw clamps, heavily, on. "On three, okay? Just like dancing." His voice is steady.

They make it upright. Dante registers its dangling arm, entirely lifeless now, with a flash of betrayal. No, he thinks. _I saved you._ It has a look on its long face like it's lost at sea; and having forgotten what it is--

(-- _who you are_ \--)

\--the way, too, is forgotten.

"Hey," Dante says. " _Hey._ "

It heaves a human sound he never wants to hear again. _Glottal, strident._ And then it does it again.

"Fuck," he seethes, through chattering teeth. He stumbles with it to crash again onto the hideous sofa with the salmon-colored cushions. (It shrieks a protest.) Pats wildly at the Knight's half-slack face like he's dabbing at a mortal wound. "Oh, fuck. Don't do this to me."

It blinks at him, unseeing; reeling at nothing at all.

He prods its facial symmetry back into place and holds it there, refusing to blink in case he misses the moment of recognition.

Drool puddles from its lapsed mouth, soft-pink and shy, then drips-- _pap, pap, pap--_ onto split leather.

( _My blood or yours?_ )

He can't stop thinking of those fucking orbs, all melty-mawed like wax models and so utterly detached from living context they all but parodied it. In the Underworld, misery was the currency of the realm. But currency as a concept had only numerical significance; unnuanced, absolute, banal. Numbers entertained no alternatives or inquiries. They ungentled all language and predated histories. Money, especially, couldn't afford to be curious about its origins. Besides, who really cared if it was a Jefferson or a Tubman that paid the electricity, as long as one of them stuck around to get you a hamburger after?

( _Your treat or mine?_ )

Someone giggles, so he does, too, like he's been tickled by a stake through the heart. He wheezes.

( _Actually--_

_\--you know--_

_\--between the two of us--_

_\--that never really mattered, did it?_ )

Dante lunges and kisses him-- then bites, wild-eyed, at the absence of any and all resistance; neither a sly reciprocation nor the petrification, the abhorrence, he expected. His devil frenzies and terror splinters him like a scarecrow undone by lightning. Something unbidden, out of the long-left, serpentine chasm of his soul, accelerates toward him until it resolves into a scene.

( _In that sweet sea-hollow by the opera house, a siren huddles over her first solid meal in centuries. It is nothing to be missed; nothing to celebrate. Her kind, like her cousins the succubi, sustained itself on strong emotions: she, despair; they, bliss. Their territories' boundaries often overlapped, and both orders welcomed their cousins to the table-- and the bed sometimes, too, on holy feast days. But meat was at best a pretention; at worst a resort, like mountain rice for the humans of the Forbidden Kingdom._

_In the womb of the water, the siren's red-gold eyes radiate with a deep-sea malevolence. Blood washes her chin and throat so she seems bearded; maled and unsistered by what she has done, in the name of that sisterhood-- no. No excuses. She was simply weak. That was all. And now she must eat or be eaten. Truthfully, the roles had not mattered, but her surviving sister had insisted on this order: drawn open her succulent throat and spread her soft-strong body--so often and so well tasted, still so ready despite itself--and then smiled, without teeth, and said--_ ) 

The playback garbles; rewinds.

( _"To think Sparda sired twins," they purr, plucking with sickle-sharp claws at his coat's exquisite embroidery. "And with a woman!" They scent his fluttering, human turbulence; the frailty that also indicates flexibility, resilience, resonance. This blend of devil and human is so rare and so rich. Sparda's stock is young, too; his devil newly presented, nubile, and-- oh?_

 _"Twinned-- but not yet twined? Oh, sugar." She pouts, but has to bite her lip at the chap of his pride_. **_Delicious_** _. "Did you kill him, then?"_

_The youngest unfurls her face from their nearest neck, then giggles and dives back into the nest of blood-red braids. Her sisters' barbs are overtures; as with all courtships, but especially between devils, a little sourness spurred the venom of desire._

_"Bless your heart," the middle sister leers. "Misshaped by the ewe, I suppose."_

_"Perhaps," she smirks, catting her gaze and marking his frame. "Still, she **delivered**."_

_He levels his sword. "Enough."_

_" **Are** you?" the middle hits back-- lustily now, slipping; scenting it, too. "Is that why you're all alone, **Don** Sparda? Because you were not just 'enough'-- you were **too much**?"_

_Danger intimates itself: the tickle of baby's breath, milky with mother's love and her illusive security; the inexplicable sense that, though it is midday, the clock will soon chime the witching hour; the thawing heart slapped on the counter of the butcher, who was not a superstitious man; the organist playing at mass time in an otherwise empty church, because the church was never truly emptied of the honor of God._

_The boy's devil bunches its coils, body and bones humming blue, as his allied angel begins to slant its rays upon them._

_Suddenly, she understands: the sacred blade's impossible identity; its master's nature made brutal beyond consolation, by the noxious cocktail of a grand ambition joined to the great love so unmoved by it. "Don't be upset," she soothes; for their sake. "You've come for our services, haven't you?"_

_"In a matter of speaking," he drolls._

_The middle sister bows with a sneer, elbowing the gawky youngest behind her. "Such an esteemed guest."_

_He smirks, coldly perceptive, at the maneuver. His humanity is diminished, then, but that was not so unusual among even their purebred prey. They could tame any twin-- any blood-handed man marooned on the shores of paradise with none to share his fate._

_"We are Nemain," she says, "Goddess of War and of Poets, in the clovered country--"_

_"--though we were plucking the Greeks long before that," the middlest mutters, jostling the youngest behind her again._

_"And Patron of Twins, in our motherland. To us, love and war are not so different. You need particular"--she smirks, brandishing their oppressive sexuality--"virtues, to be the last one standing."_

_"In a matter of speaking," the middle taunts, lewdly, then disengages with a haughty toss. "One-- is Conviction."_

_"Ambition, another." She introduces herself, too._

_"And the last?" he prompts the youngest, who giggles, unhappily, and evades his shrewd stare._

_Conviction shrugs, expansively, between them. "Apathy, in your mother's tongue. 'Antipathy,' maybe? I don't know. The Romans crucified the language and it's still rotting on the cross, today."_

_She is relieved to note the slightest smile--some progress--before it fades before his entitlement. "My father's, then."_

_"Her name means 'whatever must be done to wake into the dream,'" Ambition cedes. "It is anything the dreamer requires to sing a single vision, without stopping for breath or silence."_

_"I see," he says, lightly._

_"Do you?" Conviction sallies forth, affecting a swagger alien to her center of gravity. "Neither your father nor his dream survived his love. How will you account for yours?"_

_"Dreaming is a loveless bliss," Ambition agrees, winding her hair more snugly with the youngest's. "Even when it is about love." She is amused to observe the boy sway back, only just, before flowing into the proper stance to circle her sister. His focus strays to the youngest, with the unhurried assurance of a wolf among three capering sheep._

_"Think what you will," he says. "I take what I need and leave the rest to rot."_

_The youngest eases from their scarlet nest again, almost penitent; it has been eons since history produced such a tragedy of twins, and she carries their stories like fallen birds, lightly, in her mouth. Her counter-assessment is a whisper of feathers upon the scale: "No, Vergil. Because you took it from him, it rotted. Only in misery will you share tenderness. It will ache until he dies, and follow you to your death. The dream is a salt-stone inside you, because it is already dead. And it will kill you, too."_

_Even the air dares not breathe._

_He swallows, face flat and pale with fury. It is admirable that despite his color, his composure and form remain impeccable. He turns on their middle sister. "I have no need of you, nor your Ambition. What I require," he utters on an edge, "is **her**."_

_Conviction sighs, heavily. Picks her ear, leaning into it. "Figured you'd say that."_

_And when her shape shimmers into his, it all--as the humans say--goes to hell._ ) 

The circle stalls, incomplete, but Dante's not an idiot. He can connect the dots and take aim.

"Nevan," he hisses, vicious and uncaring; the prison guard quickening to his wards' hatred. "'Ambition,' whatever your name is-- _I'll do it._ Do you hear me? I'll kill her, I'll do it, I'll tear her out of you if you don't--!"

The shadow giggles, sadly, and retreats.

 _There's_ the bony, black back of his fury, he thinks, right as he trips over it. Awareness of his position descends and utterly bewilders it, like a blanket thrown over a small dog. It's been a long time since he's been really, truly angry with anyone but himself and, with the Knight mumbling against him, he can't afford the extra weight. _Flies and honey, right?_ And then-- then there are mother-memories, like bullets blown through stained glass windows: meadow-yellow hair and fine-rough hands; _flies and honey, Dante,_ and _Dante, be **nice** to your brother._

 _Please,_ he bites off this chunk of himself, but it, too, is more than he can swallow. Desperation was only another, bluer hue of desire, and his had mixed well enough over the years to bruise bone. He can't speak it, but he must say it: _I'll find your sister, I'll bring her back, I'll-- I'll set you free, please, I'll do anything--_

 _I don't believe you,_ Nevan purrs, savoring the complex bloom of his intentions. A bottle of fine Diamine ink, upended over a rare and beloved book. Her shadow tucks itself over her shoulder, chin limning the white wing of the clavicle; and together, they suggest a cruel and slant symmetry to her master and his pet deformity. _Why not just eat him?_ she laughs. _Then you'll **always** be together._

Dante grimaces. He kneels half onto the sofa, cradling the Knight's head and rocking with its tremors. "You son of a bitch," he whispers, wiping its sticky-slick chin with his coat sleeve. "How much longer am I gonna have to clean up after you, huh?" He turns his head into its hair and breathes in decay. It lodges in his lungs like frost and, as befits its nature, corrupts his hesitant kindness into a violent resolution: if Nevan won't help him, he'll break her; and if she can't, he'll break her, too. Simple-headed; simple to please. _And what was so wrong with that?_

"I won't ask again," he says. "Tell me how to-- to fix this."

( _Help me._ )

Not a peep from the peanut gallery.

" _Nevan_ \--"

_Oh, sugar. What makes you think I still can? Maybe cutting off my sister's head sealed his fate. Romantic, hm?_

Steam snakes from his blackening jaws as they expand, and he digs claws deep into the Knight's carapace when it gurgles, panting in those vapors like oxygen. His devil rolls its shoulders and rises, indignant, like a young lion that intends to rectify some insult from the hyena queen. It hunts for her ultraviolet signature.

"It's-- enough," Dante manages, lisping as his fangs cusp. "It's too much."

The shadow giggles, again, and Nevan chuckles, warm in her way like mulled wine. _If you were in my shoes, it would never be enough; even if God himself lashed him to the mast and he forgot his name--forgot **your** name--you would never stop._

He can't help but laugh; to match the black-ice block of despair with some habitually buoyant inanity that, nevertheless, falls flat. The attempt earns him a patter of spitty blood; fangs aren't very forgiving when they're forgotten.

 _Dante_ , the shadow murmurs, and he startles at this familiar voice he has never heard. No-- he knows it: from the sea hollow; the soprano soaring in the opera house. _You know that he is dying--_

(The double-headed coin drops--)

 _\--and you know it is not because of me_ \--

(--pings merrily--)

\-- _or because of any god or devil--_

(--and loses itself under the house seats.)

\-- _it is because of you._

He shudders-still. Lists to one side. Then the other. Then the other, and then the other; as if run through and accommodating an invasive agent; the point of entry like the lurid lips of some reviled prophet, moving against the public body with a too-private and unwieldly augur.

( _Yes._ )

( _I know._ )

His devil moans like a man, and puts its head in its hands.

 _Well,_ Nevan sighs, _I did promise to help you. I never dreamed it would hurt so much._

He can't be goaded by her glee; realizes he is petting the Knight's head like a child's. A meditation of movement without critical context, only the indefensible and yet utterly infallible edicts of instinct. _Hair as dry and sickly-sweet as old hay._ Every breath he takes seems to be quickly rolled up behind him, mortared, and then bricked over. He shuts his eyes. _Better; the blood-dark. Womb-warm; this gentle, throbbing blindness._ The bladed bones of his shoulders confess themselves into terrible wings and, with a quivering, opalescent sheen, they fold forward to hook beneath the Knight's pauldrons.

In their little cocoon of blood and breath, the beating of the heart resonates. He shouldn't be so calm.

"With friends like you," Dante prompts, but doesn't bother beyond the conditional--too many derivatives--preoccupied with massaging the sprained cords of the Knight's neck. It dribbles on him, using his coat as a bib, but he only fits them more snugly together.

 _Yes,_ Nevan agrees, with unexpected grace and solemnity. _For us, there is no difference._

There is something else in this--some grim and slippery shrapnel--too deeply insinuated for Dante to extract its meaning. But Nevan spares him the knife and, when she and her shadow fade from the fore, he's left holding it instead. _The knife;_ _the reflection._

The Knight seizes and Dante crushes it to him, too terrified to see its gibbering face if he must hear it, too. Would it eat him alive, if it could? It's only misery, he thinks. _Just bones_ , _but--_

He shuts his eyes. Makes it straighten up. Pulls open the convulsive maw and places his tongue inside. Bites, hard. _This is an intervention._ He tilts the Knight's head back with one hand and stimulates its throat with the other. _A medical necessity._ It chokes, and Dante thinks, _Oh. Really didn't think this through_ , before its gnarled hand flaps and rips his shirt to snare itself there; barely sustained by the fabric, right against the perfect and whole weight of his amulet.

It swallows.

Relief floods Dante like a drug, and he is so grateful to be already sitting with the awful swoon. His tongue heals too quickly for this, so he bullies it along the Knight's serrated teeth. Blood flows over and down its heaving, black-gummed gullet. Its tongue inspects his own, finding not some calculus but a bright reservoir of vitality. The contact, though painfully intimate, is so utilitarian it unbodies him. _Like kissing a-- a carnivorous cow._ He permits its exploration until its appetite outpaces his generosity-- when the Knight snaps too greedily, seeking to sever flesh, Dante checks it. It's nothing in this form; he shows it how easily its diminished mass can be pinned with a snarl.

Its expression remains harrowing, no longer ravaged by nerve damage, but still-- affected by it: one eye is so severely hemorrhaged the sclera is piebalded scarlet, the pupil macerated, puddly, in the milky-blue bowl of its iris; one cheek scowls, too jowly for such fine bone structure; and the right corner of its mouth is dog-eared, as if to mark the episode. Dante reaches out, drawn, and places his thumb over the bloodstain there.

The Knight blinks-- _click-click, click-click_ \--then relaxes in his hold and opens its mouth. _Obedient._ He lets it suck, then gently nibble, to prick fresh beads of blood from his thumb; his palm, his wrist. _A wire yanks taut._ Iron clinks against crystal as it cradles the rosy bulb of the amulet in its hand, and he jerks-- into it. _The instrument seems to perform._ It rolls its thigh, obligingly, between his legs, and--

Dante gags and stumbles back. The pendant lags then drops, knocking over his breastbone. He locks his fingers over his lips, as if to insulate them against the icy bleed of his own barbarity. A creature consents to nothing but its nature. _Nothing but its creaturely-ness._ He fumbles for the pendant's latch, panting thinly through his nose.

"You should remember this," he blurts, once the whole gives itself up into discrete and glittering halves.

(-- _"Happy Birthday, sweetheart"_ \--)

"I wanted the gold one, so you"--and here, he thrusts it blindly forward--"you took it because you were a little brat." He tries to smirk; lowers his head to contemplate this re-gifted treasure instead, alive with his body heat but inscribed with another's name.

The Knight's joints pop as it crouches, then labors to its feet. Dante's wings bunch beneath it, sullen with their smallness. One, still hooked under its pauldron, hangs between them like molt. He feels like a little boy again, starry-eyed before he was slouching with contempt in the long, bloody shadow of his family's legacy. _To hell with it. That's where it went and that's where it should have stayed._

The thought hurts so much more than he predicted it would, but his vision remains clear: he sees the Knight's hand cover his own. Its fingers articulate with near mechanical deliberation to press the golden half back to his silver one. They clink together again, magnetic. _An energy, relieved._

Dante looks up. The opposite, uncrumpled side of the Knight's mouth tics up, repeatedly, and he realizes that it is trying to smile, too. His face immediately falls. "Why?" he pleads. "It's yours."

It shakes its head, loops the slight chain around one claw, and slips the pendant back under his shirt. The ruby glints from the slitted hole opened there, and tingles against his worn-raw body. The gauntlet begins to withdraw, rattling with rust or some rheumatoid affliction, and Dante immobilizes it by the wrist.

The Knight sits again, heavily, and tilts its head.

Dante swallows, blinking fast. "You took-- everything from me. You killed my-- _Nell_. And then you left me alone with--" He shrug-spasms, trembling with laughter. "Whatever this is. I--"

The Knight pulls. He steps in.

It leans its great head against his chest, marking the tiny, interminable flutter inside him with a thrum. _Stop_ , he means to say. A rasp of pain, instead; grief, drug-up and drug-out. It nuzzles and mouths, widening the hole until it's gone, and then there is nothing between it and the old, thin scar that-- always feels bigger than it actually is. He shivers; keeps-- keeps shivering, as it rubs its nose along the indentation and breathes him in. The scar is off-color but smooth; it never formed keloids despite his own abuse, and owing to the maintenance and craft of the--

Dante feels teeth as the Knight drags not-kisses along his rib bones--playing, perhaps, or _curious_ \--and then wet heat, laving heat, _too-much-heat_ , when it tongues the scar.

His knees give out and it steadies him by the upper thigh. The amulet twinkles, and his devil bays. He has almost the same reaction to it as when he heard stray cats fighting in the street, from the window of his childhood room. He'd thought they weren't even animals. Now, he just croaks: mouth dry, spit still somehow electric; super-conductive, circuit-seeking. It laps again, jolting his spine, and kneads the tense muscles of his thigh until they loosen. Its fingertips gore him and he flinches, trying not to hyperventilate at the scent of arterial blood. The Knight huffs, lets go, and he catches himself in its hair-- falls head-first into the sweet dream of detangling it, fresh from their bath, and taking such care that sometimes bedtime snuck up on him and he'd doze off against that warm, unguarded back; all other pleasures and cares forgotten.

This sweetness assaults him, even as the corruption of the present reasserts itself. Dante tightens his hold as if to uproot a weed, then curls in on himself and his-- the Knight. He hears a voice--almost-a-voice--abruptly bleat its anger and frustration, and he laughs. _It hurts._ His hips twitch, and his smile contorts into a V of misery. _There is nothing to ask for, because there is no one to listen._ He hears a tinny scraping, then a little ping, and feels a glancing, prickling impact against his belly. The Knight groans and scrapes punishingly at its chest. It tries again, gnawing at its gauntlet until another tooth breaks. Blood trickles from its mouth as it almost-howls, and Dante's hair stands on end as the real twines with the--

( _"If you insist," Gilver smirks._

_Tony can't see his face, but satisfaction sharpens the other man's eyes like a cat's. Cats got pretty pointy when they were happy enough to make biscuits, and he can appreciate that. They were cute, too. "Well well well," he grins, showing teeth. "Figured this'd go the opposite way, but hey, flexibility's important in the gig economy."_

_Something-- ripples between them, dark and dangerous. Tony thinks of a severed cable spitting sparks in the dead of night, because he's a city shoe. And a tramp, he guesses, if he acknowledges this particular threat just to savor its thrill. He's never met Gilver before in his life, but sometimes he seems to hate Tony so much it feels personal; like he knows him well enough to utterly despise him, and **that** feels--_

_"'Gig' economy," Gilver drawls, like Tony's dropped a dead rat at his feet. The ice in his tone makes him hot all over, and he guesses he has a type. "Allow me to enlighten you with some professionalism, then." And then Gilver takes the tucked-in tie of his bandages between his teeth, and slowly begins to unwrap himself._ )

"Stop, stop, stop," Dante babbles, horrified by the chalky crisscrosses over the Knight's chest, its rage and souring fear-sweat. It hinges its jaw under one arm-plate and _pulls_.

Academically, he knows it's alive. But the pulpy, membranous _give_ of armor melted, layer by hissing layer, onto--and _into,_ and _under,_ and _through_ \--skin is an unwelcome but effective reminder. It looks right at him. And then it hurts itself again, harder.

_He sees red._

Red overlays his little in-house, private movie: _he grabs it by the mouth and--_

The tape scrambles.

( _Click-click-click-click._ )

_He grabs it by the mouth and-- the dingy white wall behind them is no longer white._

( _Click--_ )

_He grabs it by the mouth. Wrestles it down and--_

( _And--?_ )

_Bangs its head against the carpeted floor; just cement with a haggard scalp, after he and Lady removed the mildewed foam insert one stifling August evening._

( _Again._ )

_He grabs it by the--_

_It screams--_

_He snaps his teeth--_

_It screams into his mouth._

And Dante thinks, I'm going to tear him apart; when I find your god I'll put him in the same shell he put you in, until it stinks of his piss instead; until it doesn't because he can't tell the difference; I'm gonna fry him alive if he ever touches you again, and even if he doesn't, _I'll still_ \--

He gulps down air, drowning, crushing his temples together so he doesn’t fly apart, and tells himself he's withstood worse; must, even if it's a lie. Raises his head, dazed eyes fevered, swollen. Face sore and lax in surrender.

"You can't," Dante says. "It's too early. We already tried, remember? Trish said we've gotta-- gotta wait for it to just, naturally, on its own, so--"

( _"Be a big boy-- a man, right?"_ )

"--be good, alright? B-be a-- a man." He blinks-- and jumps, overmuch, when the tears streak down his face.

The Knight gawks.

"Huh." Dante sniffles. Chuckles, blandly, like being broken and brought to tears is merely some overdone and embarrassing pun. This is why he drinks-- but he's sure he's always got a good reason. "C'mon, let's get you patched up."

He's always liked using his hands, but never really had the discipline or focus to learn a trade. He favored more of a mad-scientist kind of approach. All used up with nowhere to go, though, it's a simple thing to move slowly; measure out every motion and touch. The Knight stares owlishly, docile even when Dante examines the swathe of tissue exposed by its twisted-up plate. He smiles, devastated. _It's awful._ Like it picked off some dense, uncrumbling scab; so red and pocked, from inner elbow to wrist. Like it wasn't armored but stripped near to bone in a car accident. "Really did a number on yourself, there," he murmurs.

Dante balances its gauntlet on one knee, palm-up, and gets to work: his blood as a salve, black rags of his shirt for bandages, trigger-talons to weld and buff the plate into a smoother, safer, more uniform edge. He doesn't admire the repairs, exactly, but how could he.

"Oh," Dante slips off his jacket. "Gimme the other one."

Still thunderstruck, the Knight obeys. It corks its spine to present the nerveless limb. Moving it is a challenge; it's already stiff and he knows it's dead, but-- he can't just leave it like-- because--

"--I like this a lot," Dante sighs. "But I can get another one." Then he tears his red leather duster in half, to make a vanity sling. For various reasons better left unsaid, it looks funny. Again, his smile doesn't reach his eyes. "All done. Lie down, okay? Get some rest." When it doesn't move, he pushes against its chest. Supports its back and helps it lever itself down. Like a cheap, old fold-out cot.

Prone and tame, the Knight blinks.

_Click-click-click-click._

It reaches out for him, flexing its fingers to the webs; like it's suddenly discovered their marvelous elasticity, the capability of such an intricate but simple design, and Dante-- trips off the sofa and down the hall. He walks very calmly into the bathroom, politely shuts the door behind him, and leans against it. He's punched it a few times, so this side's a little warped. Some splinters, too, but not too shabby. _Serviceable._

He's abruptly terrified it'll knock and locks the door. Listens hard, until his idiocy jangles merrily into awareness. A good-sized sneeze would obliterate this door. The Knight can't walk on its own. _It's fine._

Something that is not peace, but moves like it, nestles over him. It's only absence, the known non-quantity. The friendly reminder sanding him down smooth; so smooth... If he doesn't drink, Dante does this thing he likes to call his "skincare routine." The mirror's smuckered with congealed oil from his latest sessions, where he pressed up so close against the cold glass to just-- catalog. _The deviations._ Harder nose. Squarer chin. Lanker hair, maybe. _Where's the rest?_ He'd crowd his reflection until the eye saw only itself; until even that was not enough. He thinks he only kissed the mirror once, when he was drunk.

If only it was only narcissism. At least then, maybe he'd recognize himself; know his face in the dark, or under gauze, or with franken-bolts fastening the heavy helmiture to his jawbones; too heavy to open; too heavy to not know. But what good would it have done, if he had? _At least it wasn't too late._

( _Gilver's sneer, unwrapped, is like a hideous present to himself; of himself. In that moment, faced with him, it was as if Tony was the one who killed Nell. He didn't care why, or how, or that Gilver was only faintly surprised by the news. Almost embarrassed. To Tony, it was just another mask to rip off. Bandages? He'd actually need them by the time Tony was done with him._ )

And then later-- much later:

( _"We both know you don't have the discipline for this."_

_His brow, arched, is so much finer and more eloquent. It makes Dante spitting mad but he finds himself agreeing, marinating in the unadmitted and still-hazy idea of opposing him purely to subjugate--to subsume and consume--his twin's identity. All he can think of is a pit of snakes, hissing and fucking and eating themselves alive, because that's all he feels._

_"Yeah? Well I don't think you've got the **flexibility** , bro."_)

Dante looks past all the years, all the splintered in-between's, and into the mirror. As expected, it looks back. _The years; the in-between's._ He turns slowly and calmly--too calmly; he gags suddenly--and almost bashes his head in on the toilet bowl to avoid a bigger mess. His body heaves, rejecting whatever blend of bile and blood compels it.

But he doesn't vomit. And when he gags again, humiliated by his malingering, it's only an acrid sob. He hasn't eaten, anyway. Because the Knight won't eat, and he--

He misses his mother. So, _so_ much. He'd pretended to be sick as a child, too, because it felt good to be indulged. His so-called fever flush was as much from shame as happiness. She'd cook soup and crackers, and he got to be spoon-fed and pick the bedtime story. He could even cuddle in under the covers as much as he dared, because he was the baby and, besides, it was the Golden Rule. _Ethical reciprocity._

Dante stares into the putrid bowl, rim tacky with stale urine and blood. He spits and sits back on his thighs. Scoots into the dank little corner between the rusted tub and the wall with the yellowing paper flowers, where he tucks his knees to his chest and hugs himself. _It's cold._ Obviously; he's not wearing a shirt.

The whole sordid encounter sweeps him away again, escorting his imagination downstairs to negotiate some-- mutually beneficial alternative. _Synergistic management solutions._ He follows in a trance, boots leaving bloody prints on corporate marble that transitions to cement. His shadow swipes the keys from his belt, winks, and promises to open doors no other man can.

( _An empty room with an earthen floor. No, not empty; there's a pillow in the middle, and on the pillow is a motionless snake. It's completely destroyed: spine broken and jaws unhinged beyond its nature, tongue lolled out like its body. Its-- lower half, too, is bloodied. Some kind of ritual, maybe._

 _"Hm? Oh shit, haha. Nah, it's just asleep. Come on."_ )

Dante feels himself bend to inhabit the other three dream-dimensions: architect, observer, and the one favored by the dream. The cement staircase is revolving.

( _Another door opens and ghosts melt with menace off its hinges. Each one patronizes some vile god of sensation, and they conjure scenarios favorable to themselves from his flesh and his fears: hot, heavy breath against his belly; the too-wide, insinuating spread of a giant's claws that try, tenderly, and fail, to mesh with his more human hands; a fine nose, nosing him, hard--_ )

Dante realizes he is half hard. But he doesn't unroll or otherwise try to relieve himself. It's a minor discomfort he doesn't have the resources to situate more urgently. An odd feeling accompanies this thought: his eyes dilate to receive additional input--he _feels_ the pupil flex, eagerly--at the same time he vetoes the motion and withdraws more fully into himself.

(-- _and bites his own cheek, against his own sound; as those claws walk up his legs and grip; and pull his thighs outward to widen his stance. They hold his weight like it's nothing, like a girl's wrists in a man's. He hasn't been handled like this since he was a teenager, and it was never-- like this. If he was up against a wall, wanting and writhing with rage, it was with the sword out his back and-- he tries to close his legs, just to feel what he's really up against, and is rewarded with a more intense, almost vindictive, stretch. Wide-opened. It's delicious, and just what he wants. His pants press uncomfortably, visibly, and he drops his head to his chest with a wretched, quiet moan. Here, in the dark, he guesses he can make whatever sounds he wants-- if he really has to._ )

Dante shudders; thinks he needs to spit again, but doesn't move. _It's cold._ The faucet is dripping.

( _The breath and the tongue: intent on fevering his skin, and then on the strip of his old belt. The great head nuzzles between his legs, radiating heat and taking his in, and nudges insistently at his balls. He cringes, rasps out--_

_"Vuh--"_

_\--can't finish it. The head sighs, deeply pleased; like he didn't even have to push himself further, like even that much would sustain. It licks his buckle-- then bites and jerks it like a lion, galvanized to ferocity so soon after feeding by the taste of any metal. He squirms with horror, but nevertheless affirms his own monstrous appetite: any resistance tokenizes itself; he knows he is only moving against his restraints because he wants to move **with** them._)

It's too easy, in dreams, to feel that sweetness is a kindness. The agony of supreme bliss demands tribute, like god--the supreme arbiter of bliss--demands tribute, and Dante thinks he needs to find his shadow, the thing that is projecting these vile images, because he doubts he'll survive watching and feeling himself come apart, while he comes apart; thinks he'll take anything over this room, even a box in an alley.

( _When he rounds and turns the knob, it holds fast. Alighieri's most beloved face peers across the close at itself. He rattles the poet's door. Kicks the frame and pushes, punches; but his profile's eyes remain fixed on their mirror image._ )

Honey-colored linoleum melts under his gaze. There are bees in his brain and they beard past his lips, where they begin to vibrate against the foreign mass of his tongue. Occasionally, the body had to persuade itself that it was neither invasive nor harboring a threat, and the easiest proof of that was simple, rote pleasure. Quick and dirty. _Just to take the edge off a little._

( _The Knight intercepts him against the door, and he bucks and shimmies until the dream-dimensions collapse and absolve him of control._ )

Dante unfolds like a shaky foal and opens his pants one-handed, like he's preparing to examine a growth for excision. His other arm hugs the opposite shoulder--a sling his body has made of itself--and when he unzips it's just as bad as he thought it'd be. Fever-flushed. He watches it throb. _Malingerer._

( _"Perhaps you've contracted syphilis."_

_"Yeah, well, maybe **you** have."_

_His twin levels that very particular look._

_Dante shrugs. "Thought that crap was caused by too much philosophy, anyway."_

_The silvery-clear laugh shocks him-- and his twin, too, apparently; like it's been tickled right out of him, and Dante can't help feeling--dreading--that this memory will be one of his sweetest._ )

He lets the ghosts have him. Touches himself, stroking his aches, in the locked room of the poet that adjoins the silvery-clear chamber long, long before it. The Knight amuses itself with him pinned against the door, with his dick between its massive thumbs. It rubs the little dribbling head up and down as if fascinated by a mechanical marvel, a toy in miniature, and Dante thinks, playing with himself on the floor next to his toilet: if I do it like this, like you'd do it--like an animal, like a-- a _thing_ \--what does that mean? _That I want to fuck animals because I'm no better?_ His stomach drops out and he inclines, expectant, toward the toilet.

He lets it swallow him and he sobs; he tries to fuck its face, it carries him to the unmade bed. The mattress wheezes with its weight and he writhes on the sheets like he's been gutted--thinks, _Oh, these are pretty nice; high thread count_ \--before he's bent back up and over himself, legs held high and hanging over its black pauldrons. _Exposed._ It thrums, nuzzling and nibbling and persuading him open like a whore.

( _"What do you think you're doing?"_

_"Working?"_

_"You don't have to-- for money?!"_

_"What else?"_

_"Just take it!"_

_"Nah. I **like** this. I don't want your fucking **money** , bro."_

_" **Take it**!"_

_"You trying to buy me? Or are you just jealous?"_ )

When it licks his hole, he arches and covers his mouth. This particular cry is too desperately naked, but it's like the Knight hears it anyway: it licks again. And again and again, so sweetly indulgent it almost erases the act's crudity; until he loses his dignity and takes it out on the nice sheets, instead. His knuckles scrape-bang on the stippled wall that separates this room from that more sacred, silver chamber, body and soul begging for release; he wants it so badly; he wants to be wanted and to be forgiven, so badly. But there is no one next-door who is not already here with him; and so no one answers.

It probes the bud of him, and his own pre drips onto his chest. He flinches, like-- like crying. Hugs himself to keep from shaking, while the Knight's adulations lumber from its jaws to crack his head like an egg. Your voice, he thinks. _Please, your voice._

It blooms him open around its tongue, agile yet mute, and works with his contractions to widen and deepen, loosen and sweeten. Sheer size would allow minimal technique or even a lazy one, but the Knight is, of course, a chivalrous partner. Dante manages not to shout with the first long, rippling stroke, and the next and the next and--

It kneels upright and hoists him clean off the bed, petting and pummeling the little nub inside with relentless, animal vitality and-- meditated, human endurance. Dante's eyes roll and he drools, dangling boneless and just as immobilized by pleasure. It begins to feel like a game: if he clenches too tight, the Knight pauses until he behaves himself, gasping and swinging upside-down around its neck. He still kicks his heels into its back-- swears when it's more like barking a shin on the serenest and most marblest of statues. But it relents, suckling at his rim and teasing its claws over his tailbone until he can't shout anymore; until his legs are numb and trembling; until he paws weakly at its faulds and it rolls its cold front against him.

He hears it lick its chops as his back meets the sticky sheets again. Even in this state he keeps presenting himself, suck-addled and earnest. Keep fucking me, he thinks. _Keep wanting me. Don't-- don't leave me. Please don't-- don't hate me, I--_

It slides a warmed gauntlet up his belly and chest, and strokes his throat with its claws when he angles into the touch, freshly wetted with his come. He catches a digit in his mouth, nursing it clean until his dick plumps again. The gauntlet retracts in the same manner--the same sharp-tipped glide--until it settles palm-first over his belly, with his dick snared between the V of its thumb and forefinger. Circles the dullest, gentlest part of its thumb against the weft in him left after-- from the womb. He shivers with the unnameable.

The Knight rumbles as if in agreement, and then it bends again between his legs, between his hole and his hardness, where it makes its soft suggestions: nibbling, nosing, torturing the root of him past taut skin until he shifts to better align its mouth. It huffs, undeterred. Dante whines and does it again, but the Knight stays true. He can tell it's smiling; feels it against the perineal seam of his needs.

"Goddammit," he sighs, when it noses his balls out of the way like a sack of oranges at the supermarket. He relaxes purely to, in the next moment, kick with everything he's got. It scores him a real doozy of a point when he clocks the Knight so hard under the chin he imagines its eyes rattling, like their old Saturday morning cartoons and marbles.

It retaliates, of course-- flattens him to the bed with bites and-- and kisses just as, if not more, alarming. Dante yelps at the cold shock of its carapace-- reaches for it again when it quickly separates itself from him, regardless. "You--" he starts, accusing. It kisses him and he bites back; it kisses again, tenderer, and parts from his lips to kiss his sore throat and soft collar, his shaggy-pale pits--snuffling so happily, there, that he goes red as lobsters--the backs of his knees and his soles-- each of these shy, secret parabolas the approximation of another. And Dante remembers, suddenly-- he understands, suddenly, what it wants from him. He swallows half a desert full of sand.

"You're-- too big," he says, even as his devil, wagging its tail, overrides him and manifests. New pheromones layer, subtly, and the Knight hums. "Too big," he repeats. Strictly speaking, he's taken "too big" before, a little further down south, but-- but he's never, in devil form-- he'd _never_ \--

The Knight takes his hand and, unhelpfully, demonstrates the magic method with its tongue between his fingers.

Dante snatches himself back, hissing. His wings loom above in such an overt display that the Knight crouches placatingly. It has the gall to seem ironic about the whole thing, however, even fond. It leans up and in, hesitating when Dante snaps his teeth twice in the space between them. He feels it stroke along the tapering fingerbones of one wing, emphasizing the garish thing's fragility with the gentleness of its manner. Between the two of them, the cruel waste of so much and so many years, Dante begins to understand the Knight's interest in his-- in doing this.

But when it pricks its tongue on the fang of his wing, he still droops with disbelief. It sucks itself bloodier, and when it guides him down, he doesn't resist apart from the bitten lip, the cringe, at its proximity. It blinks, audibly, before pushing his legs to one side; together and away from the specter of its blunt, sexless groin. The movement disturbs his-- less familiar intimates, and he pants with anxiety. It's such a small, shallow thing-- not for reproductive function but-- exploration, he guesses. Its alien heat repulses him. The Knight croons, which makes it somehow worse. Dante kicks his leg, wanting not to feel it-- wanting.

The Knight hesitates again. It settles slant over his torso to pepper more kisses, and Dante is infuriated by-- everything. His vulnerability, its shambling appreciation and cautious, dumb mouth. "What am I, then," he sneers as it plants another pepper-kiss, "turkey dinner? Gonna salt me and t-turn me over and..." He leaves it unsaid. The Knight sighs, straightens, and looks at him. He scowls, snarls when it cups the back of his head in one great palm. " _What_. You're-- ten feet tall, in full armor, and I'm--"

It lengthens its neck to show the apple of its throat, then traces Dante's nose along the gone-greenish stem of its jugular. The flesh is supple here, still preserved, and Dante tastes what is offered even before he thinks to take it. _Oh._ He shudders. _This one._ His devil arches. _Yes. **You**._

Dante bites and blood fills him. His wings snap around the thing he loves, his hands worship the exultant, pained face turned up and away from him, his legs bow open to their wound. It moans in his teeth like a man, and his devil wails when a gloved and unsteady finger draws down the mend of his sternum: from sword- to birth-scar, reassuring the rent and the root buried deep within him. _It burns._

It burns so much, like-- like a sword fight; and losing against him and-- and into him. An erection doesn't-- ache quite like this, like something inside is wringing itself out into a convulsion of ecstasy; demanding the-- the knife. Something, anything, to hold down and _keep held down_ and _he doesn't know_ \-- he never figured out how to do that without killing him. Maybe now, he thinks, you'll tell me.

(He wants it; wishes it. Makes it true, eyes shut against the florescent lighting.)

 _For godsake just use your sword,_ Dante thinks. But it's so good; it's so good to him, visiting no pain at all as it pleasures him past protest with careful teeth and tongue, laudant lips and nose.

(The only thing that hurts is inside him, universally strange and inconsolable. He can imagine it easily, dripping.)

"Jesus, s-stop... _licking_ so much, I can't get...w-wet enough."

(Probably most straight guys didn't have fantasies like this; think of themselves as-- well, but who was he to judge? Maybe they did. They had to pretend, at least a little, to anticipate and provoke their partner's pleasure. But there are certain degrees of separation, he's sure, that humans--both male and female--would consider healthy. It's not rocket science, he thinks, as he assesses his maleness like it's some kind of anachronism. _A sci-fi prop._ It's erect, sure. Hot, red; wet, even. Not really that different from his demonic expansion pack, but he can't philosophize too much about sex. It's weird enough already.)

"Th-this is why humans don't have--oh, god--b-both."

It laughs, rich and dark and silver-clear.

"I'm gonna fucking-- p-piss myself if you-- keep that up," he chuckles, embarrassingly relieved when it purrs, pleased. And then, when it speaks:

"I'm not the one _keeping it up_ "--his dick strains--"but bear in mind, if you do: I'm expecting as good as I give." It massages his inner thighs, guiding the folds into a deliriously easy glide that belies its-- torment. Back and forth. _Back and forth_. It blows hot and cold, sadistic with its prising thumbs, and kisses him over the slit. Kisses, kisses, kisses; closed- and open-mouthed until it's more breathless than he is. "...But you're already so wet. Would either of us notice?"

"You're-- such a prick," he laughs, grinding forward just to smear himself in revenge. It doesn't have quite the intended effect: a low, possessive rumble. Teeth and then leisurely lapping. It traces the inmost boundary with that sleek, delicate muscle that is near-kin to itself, and he _can't_ \--

"W-we'll see if you-- n-notice when I've got you on--oh, fuck--your b-back..."

The intimacy unwinds it. The conscientious observer wakes to wonder too critically, instead, too far beyond the dream's gravity: what _would_ he sound like? _On his back, with his legs spread?_ Dante bites his lip at the juddering butterknife-twang of arousal; the sounds he wants to know that-- suddenly, like a cancer, manifest and multiply too quickly; implicating other systems and sovereign cell-memories. Those cries of pleasure repaid mire with-- the sounds of his enslavement, his pride dismembered, his defeated body balled up; bones crunched and compacted and recycled into--

( _Thank god I never heard you scream._ ) 

But he is hearing him, now, imagining it.

In a shitty little cell in an shitty, run-down industrial complex. _Home._ In a bathroom, on the floor. _Hiding while he masturbates, like a child._ There's ice with the awareness. Shame that penetrates; and grief. _Hot-cold._ Honestly, it feels a little like pissing himself. He sits in it before he shoves away the silvery-clear smile, the reversal, the broken begging voice, the-- _don't cry, shh, it's alright, I just want to-- I'm sorry, I just want to make you-- f-feel good, please, shhh, come on, it's only me_ \--

\--the piercing, animal scream of the Knight.

( _As good as I gave you, huh._ )

Dante presses his fingers to his eyes, hamstrung and heartbroken.

( _Not yet._ )

He can still make it work; still retrieve a glittering shard to transport himself far from the inevitable totality. The Knight might be too big, but what if he was _made_ to? He moans despairingly; demands more, and more depraved, scenarios from his head until it's reeling and he slumps with a thunk against the wall. All those choking-black brambles in the pitch-dark. _It would hurt._

But no, maybe it-- maybe it would be kind to him, like before. That's what he wants. _That tiny, soft-strong furrow._ Devils-gift, beloved and appreciated; because the Knight was a courtly and a-- an upright creature. The bell of its head might-- slip and roll against him until-- until he could accommodate just the needle of its eye, so he wouldn't unravel-- and then it would-- maybe, it could--

And what if, just maybe, its devil had something to appreciate, too?

The images assault him, epileptic with color and misled flesh and beastly possibilities; they carousel and twist, and when they wring out in his mind they drip so much blood it fills the room; fills his nose and his mouth and his ears and all his senses scream with impending ruin. Some torn-off thought will break him, despite the circuitous route he's taken--the road less traveled has more wolves, after all, and even if you're not a wolf yourself, you can't help but think like one in order to anticipate them-- like--

****

( _\--Like--_ )

(-- _Like a--_ )

(-- _Little doll. Little puppet, just for me. Just for me to-- just for **them** to_\--)

His heart screams at him to stop, stop, _stop_ , but he finds himself snapping back at it, Why should I? Do you think _they_ did?

It careens, tuckered. Wobbly, yolked-out. Disoriented by the comparison's senseless cruelty.

( _Puppet, huh? Can't even string myself along._ )

His dick jerks, like it's been slapped to attention, then flags; chastised. _Too much._ The Knight can't hold him up anyway because one of its arms is-- useless. Dante wishes so badly that this wasn't the one thing that did him in, like the rest wasn't fucked enough. But it did nothing to diminish his arousal; it just made him hotter, like a fire was lit in his brain and it was boiling him alive, melting down all his secret, waddly shames into a putrid and oily smoke. Neither the Knight's base nature nor his many advantages, hideously disproportionate, were enough to put it out. Worse, it made it-- worse. _The imbalance._

Between the two of them, fluctuations in power were-- complicated. _Exciting._ Accustomed to losing, Dante realizes, he doesn't actually know how to win graciously. He hugs his knees, head bowed to blink, blindish, at the limpness between them. It reminds him of a dead animal. _Something stillborn._ Despair has its own kind of messed-up satisfaction, he thinks, because it's what he accomplished; all by himself.

He listens to the faucet drip, drip, _drip_.

( _He counts the beats._ )

Behind the wall, behind the sink, he listens a little closer for the rats. _Roaches, maybe._ Most people would be disgusted or at least indignant, but when Dante thinks of those loathsome little things, hiding themselves in the dark and the discards of humanity, looking everywhere for just a little bit of water and finally finding it underneath someone's neglected pipes, taking their meager and negligible fill with their secret and small, animal gratitudes, he feels-- relief. _Profound--nuclear--relief._ A kind of curious, proximal resonance that undoes as much as it is responsible for him.

If nothing else, he thinks, he could seriously go for a drink.


	2. Chapter 2

Dante lies on the linoleum, to settle his heart; spread it more evenly apart, so he doesn't swallow too much. He looks for round, friendly shapes in the door's grain; tries to think of only simple things, with very little significance. They bob along the waves, bright and flowing ever further out and away and he grins, proud of the one he's put over on himself. There's never been a better time to appreciate what he has always hated.

_Agni. Rudra. How'd you do it?_

They don't answer, but Dante knows they've heard him by the rumbling hush of their thunder and gale.  
  
_It's alright._ He snickers. Stretches full-bodied on the floor and gives up on kicking off his boots. _I'm too drunk to get angry, so... How'd you make it work? How did-- how'd **Nevan** make it work, with three?_

He thinks he can feel their approach, like the hooves of a hundred horses, and presses against the cool, even promise of their kindness.

 _...It is easier for Nevan,_ Rudra begins. Dante is thinking about warm horse-noses--about the hayloft back home--so he smiles. _She does not oppose her element._

 _And it is harder for you,_ Agni continues, _because you still think of him as Ice. Something to melt._

Dante snorts, offended. _He **is** ice._

 _Yes,_ Agni agrees. _Because he, too, still thinks of himself this way._

Dante rolls onto his back. The venom inside rolls with him. _...I don't know what to do. Didn't you fight, too?_

 _Of course!_ Rudra says. _I am the Patron of the Storm. When my brother calls me down, I go to him. When he strikes me, we become Fire._

 _So, what?_ Dante growls. _Just gonna rely on him for everything? Tell you what to do and where and-- and who to be?_

 _Everything in nature is whole,_ Agni answers. _But the whole is two halves._

Dante rolls his eyes-- and immediately regrets it.

 _Master,_ Rudra presses, _lightning does not walk the Earth until it is called down from heaven. No flame roars without the spark to start it._

 _You are not wood and you are not rain,_ Agni says. _You are the_ \--

 _Plain English please,_ Dante slurs. He’s glad he remembered. _...I'm drunk._

 _...Yes,_ they answer, in unison-- and how, Dante wonders, has he never noticed that dark clouds flash and quicken, too, just like kindling? _You are the Arc-Lode that Ignites the Falling One._

His devil stalks soft-pawed and places itself over his heart, intent upon the echo.  
  
_Not bad_ , Dante breathes. _So, what's my-- who's he supposed to be, then?_

_He is the same. Only that he calls you to rise._

His heart stops, holding itself too timid in its hands, because it _aches_ \-- but sweetly, now, as into it his devil speaks itself and Dante heeds the name, savors its sense-gift, for the first time: _red fern lit redder by the sun_ ; _dewclaw on the runner_ ; _ember becoming amber, for its love of the long legs of the mosquito._ Never before has he found it beautiful, just primordial and inhuman; undone and lacking.

_It is like-- what is that human word? For how they look at one thing from different eyes?_

_...Perspective?_

_Yes! **Perspective**! It is like-- in the Mouth Comedies, when they gaze into each other's eyes, but see the same thing! **Together**!_

Dante groans. _I'm very drunk. Inside-my-mind voices, please._

 _...Of course._ The clouds unkink their crackling tails; the logs hiss, turn twice, and park themselves purring upon the hearth. _Forgive us, Master. We are only happy for you._

Dante swallows. Rubs his chest, blinking at the bright white light overhead; mortified but not-- not personally. _Not really._ It's all far away, now.

"Yeah," he says, hoarse. "Me too."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This will be my last update for a while. (And it's another short intermission, sorry. XD)
> 
> This fic has a [**playlist**](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/20BA00tInp9FXIhyJursYc?si=qMrngHgZTmi3pG4nUqbdGA), if you're interested. I've got three DV mixes floating around Spotify, which I suppose is the preferred platform these days?
> 
> And now, some **dedications**! (<3)
> 
>   1. I forgot to mention that this fic was a good bit tickled into being by Auntarctica's "[Anteros](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19930927/chapters/47193322)," which I believe originally used he/it pronouns to slip n' slide down the scale of Nelo Angelo's humanity. XD I wanted to explore that loss of agency and identity through my own lens, but it took a long time to focus. (If you haven't read Arc's "Opera Omnia" series, it's a real treat! Arc's a deeply feeling and descriptive writer. She also writes Reboot, if you're hungry for a kinder look at Ninja Theory's twins.) 
>   2. I also forgot to link to GummyLizard's 1D/Nelo pieces, which really got me going on this fic in--oh, god--early April? Gummy plays really well with character expression and motion, and I'm always excited to see their newest work. 
>     * ["What have you done?"](https://twitter.com/LizardGummy/status/1262155265920696321?s=20)  
> 
>     * ["Tell me you're still in there"](https://twitter.com/LizardGummy/status/1268493341865508864?s=20)  
> 
>     * ["Or so it seems"](https://twitter.com/LizardGummy/status/1273385172612898817?s=20)
>   3. Special thanks to Thing #1 whom I forgot asked, "Oh, is that _the_ door?" re: chapter 1's sad-cum sesh in the Shadow Realm, and I thought BY GEORGE  
>  IT REALLY SHOULD BE, SHOULDN'T IT  
>    
>  And another kiss-a-roo for suggesting feathers after sugar, spice, and everything (not) nice in this chapter; because dreamcatchers. Yes-- perfect!
> 


The entity called Beatrice was sculpted from these elements: rheumy tar out of Lethe the River Drinking Itself, red marrow from the rib closest to the heart she would enrapture, and down from the hawk-mother whose second child would cast her eldest upon the rocks.  
  
Beatrice had all of these things--pain, desire, and the practicality to compromise; to betray the one for the other--but she did not embody them until the hawksfeather caught some uneasy dream; a black wind of fate that carried her to Mundus's court and to the First Knight, to Mallet and to Redgrave City; from Beatrice to "Trish," and then to--  
  
\--the city grocer.  
  
She considers the list of items the woman-lady has written. _Mortal necessities._ It amuses her that humans hunt only in sterile arenas like lab rats, for too chewable starches and just three different cuts of meat that were artificially dyed to imitate freshness. The air is lousy with an abnormal chemical smell-- even in the produce section, where two sallow women with carts joust, surreptitiously, for the same crate of waxy apples. With a flick of her tongue, Beatrice samples the women's wants like a snacky shopper would a cheese cube.  
  
Lady scowls. She detests demonic tells but this, too, is something of a treat for Trish. She appreciates Lady--quick to anger; with finely blocked musculature in her white, sleeveless top and loose, short pants--very much.  
  
"So what's next," Lady says.  
  
Trish snake-slips again, the purring and unrepentant provocateur, and scans the list. "...Fruit. Strawberries?" She is pleased to remember personal details.  
  
"Nope," Lady says. "Canned only, because he'll just let it all rot."  
  
When she selects _sliced peaches in water_ and _fruit medley_ and _hearty chicken noodle_ and _refried baked beans_ , Trish frowns maternally.  
  
"What?"  
  
"That's not good for him." _Fillers and leeching metals and linings.  
  
_"No shit." Lady's sneer is more disbelief than disdain. Trish likes this, too-- the creamy pity well concealed by poison and hard posture. "But he's not ready to be good to himself. All you can do is pray he actually cooks the Ez-Mac instead of eating cheese powder straight from the packet."  
  
"...It should be more nutritional raw, but this food is unnatural."  
  


* * *

  
At the register, a pubescent male records their purchases with sweaty disinterest in his duties...because he's staring at Lady. Trish isn't sure she truly enjoys male-human arousal-- particularly such an underdeveloped grade. Without demonic musk to cut it, the reek of his greasy and overtaxed glands is offensive.  
  
"Whoa," he says. "You have-- different-colored eyes." His own are crawling. "That's crazy. _And_ you're in shape."  
  
"Thanks," Lady deadpans, but tone is beyond him. "I work out at the place off Saint Augustine and Fifth."  
  
"By the fountain?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Cool... Oh, let me get those."  
  
"Don't sweat it." Lady smiles and rotates her arm to flaunt the hollow dark with soft, secret fur. She piles on bags with an emphatic, flexuous grunt.  
  
The cashier face-faults; does not fully recover. Trish collects the final bag then waves, sunnily. "Thanks-have-a-nice-day!"  
  
He blinks, mid-recalibration. Returns the gesture, puritanical and sulk-sour. "...Thanks."  
  
Trish skips after Lady. There is a wad of gum stuck to her borrowed sneakers.  
  
"You exercise at home!"  
  
"Yep," Lady says, saddling Trish with her fair share. Trish pouts.  
  
"The fountain is twelve blocks from your apartment."  
  
"Yep!"  
  
Trish giggles. Snorts, unprettily. Lady face-faults, this time. "Why do you trim your legs but not your armpits? It's just hair, but he looked-- so disappointed! Humans are so funny!"  
  
Lady reels Trish back from the curb by the hood of her jacket--  
  
Cars blast past, stinking and plastic. The traffic lights bounce red-yellow-green off shimmery-black puddles. The city is too alive with filth and infinitely rebounding sound. Before the signal changes, they cross.  
  
"...Yeah, we are," Lady replies. "I don't shave them because I like it. It looks good."  
  
"Yes!" Trish's enthusiasm is perhaps somewhat too direct. She reframes it as a more general statement. "Sometimes, humans make perfect sense: if it's yours and you like it, it's good!"  
  
Lady glances at her, opaquely, then scans the street signs. She stops. "...Damn. Missed our turn."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Knight takes a nap.

_Devil May Cry_ was not a nice place, but it had history enough for soul. And that, Lady muses, had always been part of the problem. _Her_ problem.  
  
The old brownstone basks beneath street lamps and signage, rose-gold and rich with deep, flicker-shy shadows. From this side of the glass, the windows look well-lit and grand; the double doors refined but unpretentious beneath their neon blush. She fell in and out of love, here. _It wasn't hard._ But the sign doesn't specify what, exactly, could make a devil cry and why, sometimes, it was beyond even the noblest of hearts to shelter and survive.  
  
"Keep ringing," Lady says. Trish attacks the doorbell with a kind of feline laser-focus. "He either sleeps like the dead or not at--"  
  
The shop blows open, violently, upon its proprietor who--shirtless and snarling--totters forward to slouch against the doorframe. "Can't you kids give it a rest until Oct-- _oh_."  
  
Over the course of their professional and domestic partnership, Lady has reinforced both her poker face and her iron stomach. Nevertheless--  
  
" _Hrrrk_ ," she greets.  
  
"Hey," Dante smirks, practically pickled with whatever hellish swill he keeps squirreling away. But it's the pheromones that really scuttle her butt. She tries not to visibly gag as her nose fries, dies, and her more rational mind attempts to attribute probable cause: gear oil for the rear differential, _very_ off gesso, pure un-fucking-filtered _possum_ pussy, Jesus--  
  
"Hi," Trish giggles. She's short of breath, too, but for reasons Lady immediately red-stamps as spam. "Your fly is down."  
  
Dante just grins, rakish and reeling with high-proof happiness. " _Psh_."  
  
Lady absolutely hates how good he looks like this, because it means he hasn't dealt with his shit and she's about to step in it. "Just help us with the--"  
  
The other shoe drops, as they say, sooner than she expected.  
  
"What," Dante scoffs at her blanch and bug-eyed expression. "You've seen me naked before."  
  
" _Yeah I know_ ," Lady says, "what the fuck happened to your nuts, they're--"  
  
"Oh."  
  
She can see the bomb go off; cascading hard drive failure.  
  
Trish tries and fails to supply aid. "This happens, sometimes."  
  
" _When does it happen?_ " Lady doesn't try to not shout. "Instead of balls, he's got a--"  
  
" _Don't_ ," Dante snarls. "Worry about it." He zips up, angling his trunk out of view.  
  
Trish frowns.  
  
He smiles at her, too-sweetly. "Wanna drink with me?"  
  
"You're not even trying," Lady snaps.  
  
Dante shutters and looks hard at a pothole behind them.  
  
"We, um," Trish holds up a bag. "We brought dinner."  
  
" _Whoo-hoo_." He scrapes his boot back and abandons them at the entrance.  
  
It's become more like a lair with every half-feral, half-dead thing Dante drags in from the Underworld, but Lady no longer cowers at the shadows of predators or of madmen. Arkham saw to that years before she saw to him. She won't hesitate when it really matters and that's enough. _It has to be._ Because one day, if she doesn't put him down before, Lady believes she'll walk into this dumpy office and find Dante nailed to the mantel next to his trophies; at last properly, not proximally, martyred. She carries this image of him on the cross like it is her own; and meanwhile carries him bodily, too, when she must.  
  
"Where," Trish hip-checks the door shut, "is the Knight?"  
  
Dante grabs the long neck of a clear and scentless bottle, and Lady recognizes the brand of cheap vodka from the cornerstore. He drains it, drops it, and juggles open another. On the desk are his guns, gutted and gleaming. "Couch."  
  
Lady doesn't notice it, at first. Swaddled in dingy blankets, its gray face peers from the half-light. Its boots are sticking out, but it seems content with its nest of punched-up pillows. But she's never seen the Knight sleep, and the soft-sharp snag of Trish's breath confirms her worst suspicions.  
  
"What happened to him?"  
  
"Fell."  
  
"Really," Lady interrupts. Suddenly she's very angry again. "And did that happen while you were fucking smashed?"  
  
"No," Dante hisses. "It happened right before I got fucking smashed."  
  
Lady hisses back, and Trish startles at her pronunciation. She twiddles her tongue, nervously, as one host advances on the other.  
  
"I'm so sick of this shit. If you couldn't handle it, you shouldn't have sent us away. Now you--"  
  
Dante has a good foot or two on Lady--never mind his other assets--but Trish realizes this is not a battle he will win, because he won't fight to defend himself. He shows his throat, working with yet more drink; a flag for both his surrender and his apathy. She tries to see him as a lost, lonely little boy, like she thinks she should, and puts herself between him and his attacker.  
  
"Your brother is very sick," Trish murmurs, coaxing what is wanted from the incarnate spell of her being. "Please help with dinner while I take care of him, alright?"  
  
It works like a charm-- because she is one. Before the First Knight abdicated himself to the oblivion of beasthood, Beatrice put him back together again and again--trial after trial, defeat after defeat--until he could no longer plead she withhold such mercies. She would prefer he not recover this knowledge, because if Dante ever knew he'd surely bind her just to break her. _Balance the scales, whatever it took._ Nevertheless, she retains the shape of their mother's heart and, though she rarely understands it, it continues to teach her tenderness.  
  
Trish trades a bag for Dante's bottle. He accepts it blindly, staring past her and past Lady, too, to the couch. "Kept following me around," he shrugs. "So, I just..."  
  
"Put him to bed?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"That's good!" Trish smiles. "The imprinting was successful, but you need rest, too."  
  
Dante looks down at her, with a strangely-dreamy severity. "Was it?"  
  
"If it won't leave you alone then yes," Lady mutters.  
  
"That's not what I meant," Dante continues in the same split tone. "It's like it doesn't..." He wavers on the precipice, then crushes the distance down into something far simpler; something unworthy of inspection. "Like he doesn't even know who I am, because he doesn't know who-- who _he_ is, and I don't know how to make him understand that I'm not-- that he's not just a-- that he's not _me_ , he's--"  
  
Laden though she is, Trish opens her arms and embraces him.  
  
Lady watches everything--all of it artificial; all of it too-much-more-than nature--until she can't. And then she turns to watch the Knight, mollified even as she is repulsed by its lowliness in defeat. _Remember me, you selfish bastard? In the end, you were no better than Arkham.  
  
_The Knight's head judders, rising with difficulty under the weight of her indictment.  
  
_You ruined him_ \-- _just like he ruined my mother. You're nothing but a monster.  
  
_Something is wrong with its neck, Lady realizes, like it's not screwed in all the way. It falls back down into its pillows, mouth sawing endlessly without thought. Its eyes spin, two falling stars red and blue, and through their likeness-- _different-colored_ \--some black and ominous compassion visits her: it will die-- _is_ dying, in agony and indignity, as was only right. But the sun follows the moon and the moon follows the sun. Right or wrong, she doesn't want that for them. Her love is much too good to keep score.  
  
"What does," Lady starts. "What does it need."  
  
"Just time." Trish pats Dante's arm. "Time to remember."  
  
Lady sighs. _Too much sugar; not enough medicine._ "You can change shape, right?"  
  
"Yes?"  
  
"If seeing Dante doesn't help, maybe it's just confused."  
  
Trish hesitates when Dante's pulse quickens. "It's possible."  
  
"Then do it. Show it-- show him what he looked like. You know, right? The hair and the katana and all that equestrian shit?"  
  
Trish nods. "...Dante?"  
  
Lady outgrew the need for his permission years ago, but this wasn't like knocking out a wall or assembling new furniture. Trish's deference still offends her because it's mostly political. Lady can't manipulate him like that, not because she has any moral objections but because even weaponized femininity bolsters the dichotomy between them.  
  
"Yeah," Dante coughs. "Uh, sure. Why not?"  
  
Trish smiles just right. "Let's start dinner first and we can all eat in the den, together."  
  
"Together, huh," Dante says. "So what made you a believer?"  
  
"Jello." Trish's tongue snakes. "I can't replicate human taste buds--yet--but the texture is funny. It's _bones_!"  
  
Dante grins, and Lady can't help a little one of her own. Sometimes, they really were just normal people: just eating dinner and salvaging the funny bones.


End file.
